Jeffrey Gibson

Indeed. And this is exactly why I brought up the assertion in an ancient work of the existence in India of ants that were bigger than foxes but smaller than dogs, who tunnel deep underground to harvest gold, and the accounts there of the steppe-dwelling Scythians, who wear coats made from human scalps; and of the musician Arion, whose life is saved by a dolphin as well as of the sheep of Arabia, whose tails are so long they drag them on little carts.

Anyone care to guess in what work by what author this all of this appears?

Jeffrey

Ben C Smith

Ah, but Jeffrey, surely these fantasies are evidence that our favorite Halicarnassian was intentionally writing fiction. These were his built-in clues for us.

Ben.

Clivedurdle

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cynocephaly

Which category does Ratramnus fit in?


Cynocephalus St. Christopher

JoeWallack

JW:
Wrong (easy choice hitting Jeffrey with this instead of Doug). One needs to look at all of the ancient examples including controls going the other way, where the indication is used in obvious fiction. The related statistics may justify a reliable indication.

The quote above is an obvious logical fallacy regarding statistics. Because the indicator can be found in non-fiction it can not be a reliable indicator of fiction. Speaking of which, for Ben, I skimmed through Burridge and as near as I can tell he makes the same logical fallacy. He only looks through GRB to find parallels with the Gospels in order to decide if the Gospels are GRB. All he can (should) conclude than is whether there are parallels between the Gospels and GRB. To properly conclude if the Gospels should be categorized as GRB he has to also compare parallels to other genre and "Mark" has clear parallels to Greek tragedy.



Joseph

http://www.errancywiki.com/index.php/Main_Page

No Robots

Not to mention far greater affinities with rabbinic material, as Burridge himself somewhat grudgingly acknowledges:

Thus the literary shift from unconnected anecdotes about Jesus, which resemble rabbinic material, to composing them together in the genre of an ancient biography is not just moving from a Jewish environment to Graeco- Roman literature. It is actually making an enormous Christological claim. Rabbinic biography is not possible, because no rabbi is that unique; each rabbi is only important in as much as he represents the Torah, which holds the central place. To write a biography is to replace the Torah by putting a human person in the centre of the stage. The literary genre makes a major theological shift which becomes an explicit Christological claim — that Jesus of Nazareth is Torah embodied.--Richard A. Burridge / What are the Gospels? A Comparison with Graeco-Roman Biography. Second Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: W.B. Eerdmans, 2004, p. 304.

Ben C Smith

Thank you for interacting with Burridge.

I agree that he does not look to, say, ancient novels to find his parallels. There is a simple reason for this, I daresay: Few if any would confuse the gospels with ancient novels. There are plenty of novelistic elements in the gospels, but they are not, of themselves as a category statement, novels.

This is where the parts of the book in which Burridge summarizes previous scholarship come into play (this is from memory; I do not have him in front of me). He is in dialogue with all the scholarship (and prescholarship) that has come before him, and in that dialogue the only two real, viable options are biography (so tagged both by precritical readers and by critical readers such as Talbert, Burridge, and the emerging consensus) and sui generis (so tagged by Bultmann and by the now foundering Bultmannian consensus).

Thus, Burridge does not even try to argue that the gospels are not epic poems (for example). It is obvious to him (and to most readers everywhere) that they are not.

Such parallels ought to be explored.

Yet Mark is not, of itself and as a matter of genre, a Greek tragedy. Nor is Burridge obligated to argue that it is not; there is no need to refute what is blatantly not true.

Ben.

Amaleq13

They "may" so Jeffrey and I are wrong? You seem have great faith in these yet-to-be-derived statistics, amigo. And I don't see how, even after one obtains such numbers, one could say that an "indicator" that does not always indicate something could be said to be a reliable indicator.

Just because you say it is? No. Demonstrate the logical fallacy, then you can assert it.

Yes, that makes sense. An indicator that doesn't always provide an accurate indication is not reliable.

Please explain the logical error involved.

Clivedurdle

Does not Mark being a tragedy depend on which ending you use?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_16

And were dog people real, fictional, legendary or what?

Ben C Smith

No.

Ben.

Jeffrey Gibson

It does? And even if it does, what kind of parallels are you taking about? Are you speaking of parallels to the themes found in ancient GTs, or, as must be the case if you want to say that "generically" Mark resembles Greek Tragedy more than it does GRB, to the formal and literary features that were/are both peculiar to extant GTs and which, in containing them, were thought/known (e.g. by Aristotle and Horace as well as, say, Sophocles) to be requisite to make a given work recognizable as an example of the genre "tragedy? If it's the latter, could please tell us where in Mark these parallels are to be found?

Perhaps you could also tell us, so that we can have a means by which to measure your claim, what the essential formal and literary charactersics were that the ancients thought a work had to have before it would or could be recognized as, let alone be, a "tragedy".


Jeffrey